Anubis Bot Verification Challenge Blocking Case Access
Summary
BAILII implemented the Anubis anti-bot protection system on its legal case database. The system uses a proof-of-work challenge in the style of Hashcash to deter AI companies from mass scraping court decisions and legal resources. The proof-of-work scheme adds computational overhead that is negligible for individual users but makes large-scale automated access prohibitively expensive. Users must disable JavaScript-blocking plugins like JShelter to access case documents.
What changed
BAILII, the British and Irish Legal Information Institute, has deployed an anti-bot verification system called Anubis to protect its online database of court decisions and legal materials. The system implements a proof-of-work challenge requiring visitors to complete computational tasks before accessing content, raising the cost of automated scraping by AI services. The page acknowledges this creates a temporary inconvenience for legitimate users but argues it is necessary to prevent server downtime caused by aggressive AI data collection.
Legal researchers and practitioners who rely on BAILII for case law access may need to adjust their browsing setups if they use JavaScript-blocking extensions. The system serves as a placeholder while BAILII develops more sophisticated fingerprinting methods to distinguish legitimate users from headless browsers without presenting verification challenges. This represents an operational security measure rather than a regulatory development.
Archived snapshot
Apr 17, 2026GovPing captured this document from the original source. If the source has since changed or been removed, this is the text as it existed at that time.
Making sure you're not a bot!
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You are seeing this because the administrator of this website has set up Anubis to protect the server against the scourge of AI companies aggressively scraping websites. This can and does cause downtime for the websites, which makes their resources inaccessible for everyone.
Anubis is a compromise. Anubis uses a Proof-of-Work scheme in the vein of Hashcash, a proposed proof-of-work scheme for reducing email spam. The idea is that at individual scales the additional load is ignorable, but at mass scraper levels it adds up and makes scraping much more expensive.
Ultimately, this is a placeholder solution so that more time can be spent on fingerprinting and identifying headless browsers (EG: via how they do font rendering) so that the challenge proof of work page doesn't need to be presented to users that are much more likely to be legitimate.
Please note that Anubis requires the use of modern JavaScript features that plugins like JShelter will disable. Please disable JShelter or other such plugins for this domain.
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